Simviation Forums

anybody install fsx on a flash drive so you can refomat hard drive at will and not have to reactivate everytime? is it even possible?

Do they even make 15 Gig flash Drives?

Does anyone make flash drives that will store the FSX software?

I've heard that monster flash drives exist, but I have no idea where they can be found.  And they won't be cheap.  Vista does use certain flash drives for VRAM or paging file, and that is helpful, though not for FSX which uses installed RAM.

Serves me right.  Corsair make a 16GB USB flash drive for about $300US.  I have no idea of its quality, remember there are flash drives and flash drives, containing mixtures of speeds.  But it looks like we are getting there.

I guess you learn something every day. macca is right, Corsair does make a 16GB Flash Unit. It's called the "Flash Voyager" and it does retail for about 300 dollars US. It would be interesting to find out how well it performs in storing a program like FSX...but not at my expence  :o  ;D  ;)

Nigel

Doesn't the registry info for the game reside in the system registry. If it does, the answer to your question is no. I think if you install to a different drive it just puts the sim files there.

However 16gb is a minimum, once you start loading mesh upgrades the size of FSX quickly runs up to the 20+gigs.  Yes registry, cfg, and other base files are automatically put on C.  However, the big user of space is scenery.  It won't be very long before fast flash can be used like external HDD for storage, but will operate far faster.

Original Question:

anybody install fsx on a flash drive so you can refomat hard drive at will and not have to reactivate everytime? is it even possible?

Answer:

Yes registry, cfg, and other base files are automatically put on C.

If you reformat your drive you will have to reinstall FSX and reactivate.

Pray tell why whould anyone want to install (or store) FSX in any kind of Flash Drive particularly the one that cost 300 mullahs. I don't believe you can play from it any way because of the registry issues and plus the fact that 16 Gigs is nothing in FSX. I'm just starting and I got over 20 Gigs used up already. What I did when I uninstalled and reinstalled was to store the downloads or add-on for critical files such as SimObjects, gauges, sound, etc.) into an external storage drive, uninstalled the FSX (completely and I mean completely) and resintalled FSX. I then downloaded and installed SP1. Then I started transferring add-ons back to the newly loaded FSX. worked real goo. The reason that I mentioned that the FSX when uninstalled i had to remove every trace of the software was because of possibole 1603 and 1722 error issue which could occur on reinstall.

Bubblehead

I had FSX installed on a differnt drive than my primary partion.
When I reformated my primary to reinstall XP, FSX wood no longer run and I got may error messages that leads me to believe that there are nessary registry  entries that FSX will not run without.

[quote]I guess you learn something every day. macca is right, Corsair does make a 16GB Flash Unit. It's called the "Flash Voyager" and it does retail for about 300 dollars US. It would be interesting to find out how well it performs in storing a program like FSX...but not at my expence

Did the copy of your FSX have SP2 already or was it an add-on? If the copy was the original, I believe you're gonna hvae to add SP2 (downloaded and installed) otherwise you may problems. Whether that could be a problem for FSX I don't know.

Bubblehead